Salvador Dalí

Allan Rich Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist)
Acquired from the above at a benefit for United Cerebral Palsy in 1971

Executed on thick card with a prepared backing board which is taped to the over mount along the edges. A close inspection reveals some faint original glue stains around the edges of the collage circles. There is some minor shrinkage in the red gouache of the figure towards the center of the lower edge. Apart from some light time-staining, this work is in very good original condition.
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The clock and time are recurring themes of Dalí’s oeuvre, best known for their appearance in The Persistence of Memory (see fig. 2), perhaps Salvador Dalí’s most iconic image and a work inextricably linked with the psychological angst and visual incongruities that define Surrealism. Since it was first exhibited at the Galerie Pierre Colle in Paris and later to great fanfare at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932, the motif of the melting clock has become widely integrated and frequently referenced in popular culture. As one of the leading members of the Surrealist group, Dalí never confined his artistic compositions to the limitations of the rational world and often remarked that even he did not have the slightest idea what his own paintings meant. Like the visually charged works of Pieter Brueghel (see fig. 3) and Hieronymous Bosch, Dalí’s iconography largely addresses coitus, death and spirituality. In keeping with the Dutch masters who inspired him, Dalí delights in placing his subjects in fantastical settings.

Unlike Albert Einstein, whose explanation of space-time was given in a mathematical equation, the artist responded to questions about the significance of the soft-clock motif by calling for more questions than the desired answer, “Rest assured, the famous soft clocks are merely the soft, crazy, lonely, paranoid-critical Camembert of time and space” (Salvador Dalí, Conquest of the Irrational, New York, 1935).




Fig. 1 Photograph of the artist in front of the present work at the benefit for United Cerebral Palsy in 1971